him. Every passing lamp lit up her
face, her smoldering eyes, her lips, her hair. The goblin took her
place, the goblin with sidelong glances, tasting of scent, powdered,
pranked, soulless, lost. What was she doing at this moment? What
invitation glittered in her look? Michael nearly told the driver to turn
his horse. He must reach the Orient before the show was done. He must
remonstrate with her, urge her to go home, help her with money, plead
with her, drag her by force away from that procession. But the hansom
kept on its way. All down the Embankment, all along Grosvenor Road the
onrushing street-lamps flung their balls of light with monotonous
jugglery into the cab. To-night, anyhow, it was too late to find her. He
would sleep on whatever resolve he took, and in the morning perhaps the
problem would present itself in less difficult array.

Michael reached home before the others had come back from the Opera, and
suddenly he knew how tired he was. To-day had been the longest day he
could ever remember. Quickly he made up his mind to go to bed so that he
would not be drawn into the discussion of the delightful engagement of
Stella and Alan. He felt he could hardly face the irony of their
happiness when he thought of Lily. For a while he sat at the window,
staring at the water and bathing his fatigue in the balm of the generous
night. Even here in London peace was possible, here where the reflected
lamps in golden pagodas sprawled across the width of the river and where
the glutted tide lapped and sucked the piers of the bridge, nuzzled the
shelving strand and swirled in sleepy greed around the patient barges at
their moorings. A momentary breeze frilled the surface of the stream,
blurring the golden pagodas of light so that they jigged and glittered
until the motion died away. Eastward in the sky over London hung a tawny
stain that blotted out the stars.

From his window Michael grew more and more conscious of the city
stirring in a malaise of inarticulate life beneath that sinister stain.
He was aware of the stealthy soul of London transcending the false
vision of peace before his eyes. There came creeping over him the
dreadful knowledge that Lily was at this moment living beneath that
London sky, imprisoned, fettered, crushed beneath that grim suffusion,
that fulvid vile suffusion of the nocturnal sky. He began to spur his
memory for every beautiful record of her that was stamped upon it. She
was walking toward him